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A Higher Power: Religious Legacies in Popular Conceptions of Substance Use Disorder

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A Higher Power: Religious Legacies in Popular Conceptions of Substance Use Disorder A Higher Power: Religious Legacies in Popular Conceptions of Substance Use Disorder Sam Keaser Abstract This article traces theologies of individual and divine agency as they relate to faith healing throughout three cases in U.S. history—the milieu of faith healing movements at the end of the 19th century, Alcoholics Anonymous at its founding in the mid- and late-1930s, and a Pentecostal pastor’s work with New York City teenagers with substance use disorders (SUDs) in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the importance of religion in American life, faith healing’s role as a generator of theological innovation, and the persistence and dynamism of individual and corporate religiosity in the United States, it is argued that religious conceptions of health and recovery play an important role in the construction of social and political narratives. Although not always and not at all times, this paper argues that one outcome of theologies of agency in relationship to healing and the divine is the popular assumption that people with substance use disorders who are not abstinent do so because they have made a conscious choice against such an option. This has ramifications for social understandings of SUDs, notions of what constitutes sobriety, and alcohol and other drug policy in the U.S. as the country works to address its ongoing opioid epidemic. Biography Sam Keaser is a Master of Theological Studies student at Harvard Divinity School. He studies social theory and American evangelical politics. Citing This Work We are committed to sharing our work as widely and effectively as possible while protecting our students’ scholarship. Kindly contact course instructors Allan Brandt and Alyssa Botelho if you would like to cite or distribute this work in a professional venue (publication, presentation, etc.) so that we can be sure to provide you with the most up-to-date information about the student’s project. [email protected] | [email protected] 1 Introduction Boston Mayor Marty Walsh recently came around in favor of safe injection facilities (SIFs), a harm reduction strategy in which people who use drugs are able to consume substances without fear of punishment and under the supervision of medical professionals. Even now, though, his support for SIFs is contingent on federal approval, which is unlikely to occur in the near-term.1 Mayor Walsh is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a 12-step support program for recovering alcoholics. Some have drawn an explicit narrative connection between the two.2 AA’s central text, Alcoholics Anonymous, understands sobriety as complete abstinence, and Walsh’s past hesitance to support SIFs, so this narrative goes, is rooted in his adherence to AA’s understanding of sobriety—whatever the substance, the only path to sobriety and a normal life is complete abstinence. 3 AA, and not Walsh’s politics or other religious beliefs, is taken as the main reason he opposed SIFs. This is part of a broader tendency in contemporary discourse to blame AA for public opposition in the United States’ to harm reduction strategies and medication assisted treatment (MAT) options such as methadone and buprenorphine (also known as Suboxone). Gabrielle Glaser’s 2015 Atlantic Article, “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous,” exemplifies this move. “The 12 steps,” she writes, “are so deeply ingrained in the United States that many people…believe attending meetings, earning one’s sobriety chips, and never taking another sip of alcohol is the only way to get better.”4 Perhaps, but Glaser does not consider the broader American religious context of which AA is only a part—and a relatively small part, at that. Blaming 1 Felice J. Freyer, “Walsh ‘absolutely 100 percent’ supports safe injection sites,” The Boston Globe, April 25, 2019 https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/04/25/walsh-absolutely-percent-supports-safe-injection- sites/xZIiWq6iRpBxtLuJpbQJLK/story.html. 2 See, for example: Britni De La Cretaz, The High and the Marty, DigBoston, https://digboston.com/the-high-and- the-marty/, July 28, 2018; it is also relatively common to hear this connection drawn in the Boston area recovery community. 3 Alcoholics Anonymous: “The Big Book,” The Original 29139 Edition, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2011), 33. 4 Gabrielle Glaser, “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous,” The Atlantic, April 2015; emphasis mine. 2 AA and other 12-steps programs for public opposition to MAT and harm reduction policies in the United States both dehistoricizes and depoliticizes the abstinence-only notions of sobriety promoted by Christian groups in the United States with arguably more social and political influence than AA. By treating AA and 12-steps programs as unembedded in broader trends in American religion, this narrative misses the context AA developed within and the ways in which this broader context is felt in American life today. This essay considers three cases of faith healing milieus and movements throughout American history with particular attention to the role individual and divine agency are understood to play in the healing process. It first looks at faith healing in the United States in the second half of the 19th century before turning to AA and its roots in the Christian Holiness traditions and finally to the 21st century federal government funding given to Teen Challenge, a nationwide addiction rehabilitation network started by a Pentecostal pastor in the 1960s. In particular, it considers the ways in which debates around the limits and reaches of human agency relative to God’s agency— debates that are ongoing and difficult to resolve within a Christian theological context—influence individual and social conceptions of sobriety. To understand public opposition to MAT and harm reduction strategies in the United States today, it is critical to understand the ways in which religion has and continues to play a role in defining millions of American’s conceptions of sobriety and agency when it comes to seeking and achieving recovery from substance use disorders (SUDs). Importantly, the focus of this essay is limited in scope. All of the subjects considered are white and the majority are men. While there is a coherent historical narrative to tell, the account that follows is partial and does not engage with the entirety of faith healing practices in the United States. It should be read as such—as an account of one thread of the faith healing movement that points toward the eventual rhetorical and financial support by a U.S. president for a faith healing 3 based addiction treatment model. Several of the works cited here offer excellent accounts of faith healing that focus on or detail the role of women and gender in faith healing, such as Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875- 1920 and Heather D. Curtis’s Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900. Jonathan L. Walton’s “Liberation and the Prosperity Gospel,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, is a useful reference text on the broad contours of some threads of Black American faith healing, spiritualist, New Thought, and prosperity traditions . Religion in the United States Although a growing percentage of Americans identify as religious “nones”—atheists, agonists, and those who believe “nothing in particular”—a strong majority of the country remains religious. In 2014, 70.6% of Americans identified as Christian and another 5.9% identified as belonging to a non-Christian faith.5 In terms of sheer numbers, religion is an important factor in American life. Nonetheless, despite these high levels of religiosity in the United States, American historians sometimes do not fully consider the ways in which religion has and continues to play a role in shaping the society and politics of the United States outside of major, visible eruptions of religious faith and activity. Religious historian Jon Butler’s “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History” examines exactly this problem. “After 1870,” Butler writes, “religion more often appears as a jack-in-the-box…[it] pops up colorfully on occasion in [U.S. history] textbooks.”6 These textbooks, however, “rarely connect American religious figures and events between 1870 5 Gregory Smith, et al., “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow,” Pew Research Center, May 12th, 2015, 3-4. 6 Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (Mar., 2004), 1359. 4 and 2000 to larger enduring patters in American life.”7 As an example, Butler critiques the lack of engagement with the religious character and explicitly religious history of the “post-1970 conservative Protestant political activism” of the Religious Right as a failure on the part of historians to understand modern American history in its own right.8 Importantly, his concern here is not the promotion of religion or using a religious lens to understand history; rather, what Butler is suggesting is that our understanding of modern American history is impoverished if scholars fail to integrate religion into their work. “[H]istorians,” Butler argues, “should grapple seriously with religion in modern American private and public life because doing less produces substantial misinterpretations of that history and the many peoples who made it.”9 Butler’s arguments on the
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